I have no idea what the title of this post has to do with the content of this post. In fact, I think there's no relation at all, other than the fact that I wrote them both. But when your brain compels you to quote Was (not Was), it's best to just do what it says, and slip in a Simpsons reference...

Here's a quick true story from the last ten minutes:
I run a weekly D&D game with my wife and friends. I'm also a middle school teacher. My students are currently working on a project so I have some time to sit at my desk and do grades. A student came up to my desk to ask for help and noticed my 4th ED Monster Manuals 1 and 2 as well as my awesome leatherbound DM journal (I have to get my monster stats together for tonights game). She started jumping up and down and sqeaked, "You play D&D? Me and my Dad and his friends play every week!" At that point five other students went, "OMG, really? So do me and my dad!" My heart just filled with geek love.

I'm about to head out to RinCon, and before I left, I wanted to make sure I let everyone attending know that I'm doing what I think will be a pretty awesome fundraiser for Child's Play while I'm there. First, some history: Way back in the olden days, when 8 bits were enough to blow your mind on ...

Anne and I went up to Oregon this weekend to visit her grandmother. We try to make this trip at least 4 times a year, and the Autumn trip is always our favorite. The changing leaves, and cool weather restore a lot of our hit points, and this year getting away from the chows in the house gave us ...

Hey Wil,
This comment isn't so much in theme with this post (which is much more about the imagination aspect of roleplaying rather than the social side, a topic you've talked about a lot) but I wanted to leave it anyway.
At the end of summer my girlfriend and I decided to put a 4th Ed. game together because it had been a few years since we had gamed and thought it was time. Partly in honor of Gary G., partly to try out the new system and partly. . . well, who doesn't want to play D&D?
I decided that it was going to be short, self contained adventured. Games would last an hour and a half to two hours. Just enough time for a little bit of story roleplaying, puzzle solving and a fight or two. Players could come in and out of the game, miss a game and it's all cool (though now everyone's envious of my girlfriend cause she's kinda obligated to be there so her Halfling Ranger levels faster than other characters).
When putting the game together I asked a friend of mine if he'd like to play, knowing that he would both love the game and never in a million years play. While he's not anti-geek, he's not exactly part of the fold either. But he'd been going through some real hard times, had just gotten through a hard divorce and needed some socialization. So I pushed the issue, saying he needed to play one game at least.
He did and now is in absolute love with the game. He's bought his own players handbook, is getting way into hist character, counts the days until the next game.
We were sitting down on the porch a few nights ago talking about what it is that hooked him so much. At one point he turned to me and said, "It's hanging out with friends and. . . imagining. You get to hang out and imagine with friends. How frickin cool is that?"
I'm going to have to direct him to this blog.

This is one of those rambling I-should-probably-just-bahleet-it-but-I'm-writing-it-because-I-need-to-even-though-I'm-not-sure-why posts. You should probably skip it. I was talking to Andrew last night (we're planning Monolith Press Global Domination 2009) and since we both love RPGs, we ended up...

And a happy Pie Day to you Wil! (I can't remember the darn key on my keyboard for the symbol. I fail at geek.)
My best friend, who is a brilliant scientist, dropped the ball and forgot the bring a pie to his lab today for him and the other scientists to enjoy.
Seriously, when you can't trust a scientist to celebrate Pie Day who can you trust?

It's here! It's here! The day we all wait all year for has finally arrived! It's π day! I'm celebrating the occasion by taking myself on a special geek date to Wizard World down at the convention center. It's even cool enough outside for me to wear my π hoodie on the train. There is going to be ...

Saturday night, Anne and I wanted to have some sort of date. I've been getting tired really quickly this week (doctor said to expect that) and I've had terrible headaches, so instead of going out, we stayed home and made dinner together. I love cooking together. I love working together in the ki...

All good points Mr. Wheaton, but are you not forgetting that the Gorn are pure EVIL.
Remember the old Mac version of NetTrek the only ship you couldn't play as were the Gorn and they were just there to mess with you? It's because they were pure, green-rubber coated EVIL.
Kirk was right to rebuff Spock.

I watched a couple episodes of the original Star Trek with Nolan last night, including Court Martial. He's not a big Star Trek fan. He prefers Battlestar Galactica -- he calls it "gangster," which is teenager for "good" -- and Firefly, but he watched it with me anyway. Though he's thankfully g...

I'm coming late to this blog post and have not had a chance to read through every comment (so forgive me if I restate something someone else has said).
The truth of the matter is, for the majority of us, wether you Wil are an asshole. . . who cares. seriously, who cares? You seem like a nice and decent guy but that's not why I read your blog. I read your blog for the insight you have as an actor, writer and geek. You have had a unique life and I enjoy reading how that has colored day to day experiences from the mundane to the extraordinary. Your writing is also interesting and thought provoking. That's why I read, I don't kinow about anyone else.
I recently had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with Brandley Whitford of the West Wing. It turns out he was one of the nicest guys I've ever met in my life. But what if he wasn't? I'm certainly glad that he was awesome, but other than that hour we got to hang I'm most likely never going to see the guy again. His asshole (yes or no) status has no bareing on my life.
For those people writing the hate mail, just chill. Celebraties can sign autographs or hang with fans at their convienience. They are under no obligation. If they have the chance, the time and are kind enough to do it, great. If not, what did you lose? Nothing. So stop acting like they were your friends in the first place. You know the only way to become friends with a celebraty? Through the same human interation that makes you friends with everyone else. If you don't get to do that. . . well, get over it. Enjoy the people for their acting ability, athletisism, voice, looks, dancing ability, musical talent, visiual arts talent or whatever it is they bring to the table of your life.
And if you meet them and they snub you for an autograph or soemthing, well I guess you won't be hanging out on friday night. Or, as Bradley Whitford's character Josh Lyman would say, "I guess that means we're not going to the prom".

About once month, I get an e-mail from someone who is convinced that I'm the biggest asshole in the world because they sent me an e-mail, usually with a request for me to sign and send them a personally autographed photo, and I either didn't respond, or didn't respond to their satisfaction. In t...

One of my best friends, David Robles, has been totally traumitized by Poltergeist. He used to watch it on HBO in the 80's when he was a kid. To this day the theme music that played o9ver the old HOBO animation terrifies him. You know, where you fly over all the animated houses and then the cameras focuses in on the HBO logo? Anyway, when I want to mess with David I just have to start humming that theme song and he starts to freak out.
Poltergeist messed up many, many kids :)

Ryan has a class in the town where I spent my elementary school years, and when Anne and I took him out there about two weeks ago, it sparked a flood of surprisingly lucid memory flashes. I was surprised to realize that in nearly all of my childhood memories, it's hot, it's summer, and it's smogg...

Hi! I was listening to Connecticut NPR yesterday and there was a pretty fascinating interview with a woman who put together a book of essays by step parents and step children who talk about their experiences. If anyone wants to listen to it, you can hear it online.
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wnpr/arts.artsmain?action=viewArticle&sid=15&id=911727&pid=173

I wanted to have something new and cool to show off when I went to the Grand Slam Sci-Fi Summit back in March, so I worked like crazy and made a very limited edition chapbook called More Than This, which is a few stories from the Do You Want Kids With That? manuscript (which is a book similar ...

There's a teacher where I work named Meranda Ward. I've had to stop myself multiple times from calling her Mrs. Worf in front of other students. Total geek dyslexia!
Also I just had a student come up to me and ask if I had ever heard of Doom Patrol. She saw the characters on Teen Titans then looked them up on Wikipedia and found out all about them. Wikipedia spreading geekdom to the children!

I published a story for the SG Newswire this morning about a USB flash drive that encrypts your data, and automatically self-destructs if someone attempts to brute-force the password too many times. The drive is made by a company called Kington, but whenever I look at the name, I keep seeing K...

That so cool! I remember watching Holy Grail when I was ten years olf with my dad. It was a different situation, he brought it to me I didn't go to him, but the outcome was the same. Both of us laughing and rewatching it for days.
Ever so often I'll see a middle student walking down the halls of the school I teach at acting totally absurd, hopping on one leg or chanting and smacking their head with a book. I always smile and think, "Ah, they just watched Python." When one of them found out I knew what they were doing they asked if they could get extra credit for finding the translation of the latin.
Now I'm not the biggest fan of modern movie humor, but I would like to think that the scene in anchorman where baxter the dog randomly has the peace negotiations with a bear is slightly reminicient of old Python humor!

"We are no longer the knights who say 'Ni!' We are now the knights who say 'Ecky-ecky-ecky-ecky-pikang-zoop-boing-goodem-zoo-owli-zhiv'!' We must give you a test." "What is this test, oh Knights of . . . Knights who until recently said 'Ni!'" -Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Night before last,...

The idea of a Ken Burns documentary on the history of video games would be the funniest and coolest thing ever! I can just image James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman reading the in hushed tones the letters written by the creators of Pitfall and Dig Dug. With forlorn string playing in the background, of course.

I've been fooling around with Intellivision Lives! on Xbox, and it's lead me down one of the most enjoyable rabbit holes I've ever dug on the Internets. The Intellivision Lives homepage has a metric assload of information about "Intelligent television," including catalogues, screenshots, history...

Hi! I'm new to responding to this blog (I've done two responses in the last few days). This isn't a message board but I thought I'd introduce myself real quick. I'm a middle school multimedia teacher from Connecticut (we do comics, photoshop and flash animation. bassicly the nerdiest class you can think of).
I just thought I'd make a quick comment on the time limit, stream of consciousness thing. As I was reading this post I had just given my students an assignment to draw a random ten frame animation by hand with a fifteen minute work time. Seeing what they do in that time frame is really amazing. While it can be stifling, as you said, sometimes some real jems come out.
That's really great to hear about your kids. The experience of having a family come together like that is a truely unique and magical experience (I've been through a similar thing myself).
Okay, fifteen minutes is about up. Time to actually work for a living!

When my friend Pauly isn't covering poker tournaments on Tao of Poker, he tries to spend ten minutes each day writing in his other blog, Tao of Pauly. He says, "I'm trying to do that ten minute exercise where I just ramble on incessantly for ten minutes in order to keep up my blog and not feel l...

I'm a middle school teacher and am writing this post in class while my students are working on a project. Can you say, "worst teacher ever?"
I live a block and a half from the "Boston Bartending College" which is located in Connecticut oddly enough. So many of my friends have gone there to help pay their way through college. So few of them have actually become bartenders. But all of them have learned how to do the wine glass pyramid thing. So Wil, if you decide to realize this dream, make sure you have the wine glass pyramid DOWN PAT! Apparently it's very important.

My first videogame memory is going to a sand covered arcade along a Rhode Island beach when I was five years old. All of the screens were just over my eye level so I was walking on my tip-toes the whole time. There were lines of older kids playing most of the machines so I had little playing opportunity. The one game that I did get to try, however, was Kung-Fu Master. And what a game it was! I kicked and punched my way through four dollars of quarters (though I don’t think I past the part where the dragons flew at you). In the end I’m not sure any game has ever lived up.

This week's Games of our Lives makes me giggle. The subject is one of my childhood favorites, Kung-Fu Master. Here's a little bit: . . . Thomas found a note from "X": "Your love Silvia is in custody now. If you want to save your dear Silvia's life, come to the Devil's Temple at once. 5 Sons of...